Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems

Dionne Brand's poetry, spanning almost four decades, has given rise to whole new grammars and vocabularies. Brand's ongoing labors of witness and imagination, marked by a profound alertness attuned to this world and open to some other, possibly future, time and place, speak directly to where and how we live and reach beyond those worlds, their enclosures, and their violences. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, the latest collection, begins with a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the Time Being, in which Brand's diaspora consciousness dismantles our quotidian disasters. In addition to this searing new work, the collection includes eight volumes of Brand's poetry published between 1982 and 2010, accompanied by a critical introduction by the literary scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe.

Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems features a range of Brand's poetic works. The searching and centering cantos of Primitive Offensive, the sharp musical conversations of Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia, and the documentary losses of revolutions in Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, where "The street was empty/with all of us standing there," are all included. No Language Is Neutral reads language, coloniality, and sexuality as a nexus, while Land to Light On writes intimacies and disaffections with nation. In thirsty, a cold-eyed flneur surveys the workings of the city, and in Inventory, written during the Gulf Wars, the poet is "the wars' last and late night witness," her job is not to soothe but to "revise and revise this bristling list/hourly." The collection is rounded out by Ossuaries' futurist speaker, who threads multiple temporal worlds—past, present, and future.

This masterwork displays Dionne Brand's ongoing body of thought—trenchant, lyrical, absonant, discordant, and meaning-making. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems is a classic and living record of one of the great writers of our age, a testament to the power and versatility of Brand's poetic voice.

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